Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, 79, announced in a speech in Jakarta that he intends to run for president in 2026, seeking a fourth term.
"I will soon be 80, but you can be sure that I have the same energy as I had when I was 30. And I will run for a fourth term in Brazil," Lula said.
The failed 2024 re-election campaign of US President Joe Biden has raised concerns among some Brazilian voters about Lula, who is in his late 80s, running for president. However, the president's biographer, Fernando Morais, insisted that Lula is in excellent physical shape and is very different from Biden.
"He is not Joe Biden. I have never seen him have memory problems. "He is a man with amazing physical energy," Morais said.
If elected, Lula would be 85 years old at the end of his fourth term and would become the only democratically elected Brazilian president to have served 16 years in office.
